Thinking about it a little more, the answer is a number, and the site tells you if you are too high or too low, so a modification of a binary search might be the answer? I’m not sure if there is a submission limit but if there isnt then that could result in a fast submission.

Say the answer is 400 and you guess 100, the site tells you it is too low, you guess 1000, the site tells you its too high, now you know its between 100 and 1000, so you can narrow it down with a guess in the middle until you get to the answer. With some automation this would be pretty quick but it would defeat the point of the challenge.

The timeouts are 1 minute for the first 5 attempts, then 5 minutes.

People are just really used to AoC’s format and use languages/frameworks that are extremely concise

That is impressive, I think it took me more than 30 seconds to get the regex I wanted to use correct, more or less the rest of the solution. This is my first time doing AoC or anything like it so I wasn’t expecting to be anywhere near the top, but the times I saw there were shocking.